Hornbeck Setting Sights on a New Course for Phila.

By Peter Schmidt

Philadelphia

A teacher has adorned the wall of a classroom at Chester A. Arthur Elementary School here with a memorial to Michelle Cutner, a girl killed by a stray bullet while walking home from 1st grade.

As Michelle's former classmates, now 2nd graders, sat in the room one recent morning and struggled through a reading lesson, they were in danger of becoming casualties of another sort. They too risked being robbed of their futures--not in the path of gunfire, but in a school system that, in view of many Philadelphians, has fallen far short...